I am always being rude about genies but my goodness they accidentally serve their purpose sometimes like silkworms or yeast. I mentioned last week or the week before my desire to know more about Honore Bowlby-Gledhill and expressed my assumption that she was lost to/in South America (I implied Brazil) in the mid-1940s but no. A random family tree online revealed she was married a third time in 1952 to François Hurault de Vibraye (1914-1977), aka Ludovic-Régis-Henri-François Hurault de Vibraye, but better known (if known at all) as François Valorbe, a man who apparently 'wrote fantastic and humorous tales close to surrealism', according to French wikipedia. There is one of his books, above. The Huraults were/are proper French nobility, it would seem, and still retain their chateau in Cheverny. None of the Valorbe material seems to have been published in English which is a shame for me (or: it's a shame I can't read French) but what I really want to know is what happened to Honore after 1957.
There has to be a story there. Her parents died when she was young, but she was very wealthy, you'd assume, then she married Vivian Bowlby in 1928 (she was 21), then Ralph Gledhill about five years later (1932-3), and if she was not actively spending the next decade trying to divorce Gledhill then at least she publicly expressed the ambition to do so within months of the wedding. Presumably she achieved this by 1952 when she was 45 and married Hurault/Valorbe, who was seven years her junior, and who must have been rolling in it (by this time she was known as Honor Cecilia Paget, by the way). Of course what is most interesting to me is her bohemianism - the proprietorship of the Dead Fish Cafe, the shooting at the Coit tower, the marrying of a reasonably unknown (?) but respected humourist/surrealist from a rich and established family. I bet she was a squeal.
I found a picture of the building that was to become the Dead Fish Cafe. It's the building with the person standing out the front, but this picture is from 1920 not 1933 when HBG was shooting out its front window/from outside it in the street at the Coit tower. It's from p. 48 of San Francisco's North Beach and Telegraph Hill By Catherine A. Accardi. The story of HBG shooting at the Coit Tower is legend in quite a few San Francisco history books but no-one takes it any further than that one incident. And why would/should they.
